Greed had driven Mr. Asabil to New York, the Promised Land of antiquities trading. He landed at JFK in the spring of 1984, and appropriately carried in his suitcase an antique worthy of the trade: a priceless manuscript made of papyrus, an ancient Coptic Gospel wrapped in newspaper. His first name was Hanna, not to be confused with the American philanthropist. He had smuggled a codex out of Egypt and had previously asked as much as $3 million for it, an unheard of fortune in those days, a price tag that showed to what lengths avarice would lead him.
Father Gabriel, a Coptic priest from New Jersey, had agreed to help him and had already made an appointment for Hanna with an important dealer in Manhattan. In the course of that transaction, Hanna dropped the asking price to $1 million, still a significant amount for a document of suspicious origin. But it made no difference: the deal fell through. Hanna then had a friend drive him out to Long Island to find a place to store the manuscript while he waited. He could afford to wait; he was certain that in such matters time was on his side. Or was it?
They drove east toward Jericho, a name that must have made him think he had entered the original Land of Goshen. Just west of Jericho was Bethpage, a Long Island town named after a Biblical village on the road to Jerusalem, the place where Jesus mounted the donkey that he rode triumphantly into the Holy City. Hanna may have thought this was his triumphal entry; he was entering the American market and he was certain that despite his recent disappointment in Manhattan, he could still sell the Gospel for a great deal of money because the dealers in the United States were wealthy and eager, and while looking over the manuscript in the Manhattan gallery, the experts who had been called in obviously thought it was a significant find. Perhaps they would pass the word and, in their anxiety to have it, they would snap at the bait. He was certain a client would turn up sooner or later; meanwhile he would stash the manuscript and fly back to Cairo.1
After driving around for a while, they found a bank that Father Gabriel had told him to look out for. It was in a strip mall in the distinctly nonbiblical town of Hicksville. There they found a bank clerk who had been recommended by the priest and who assigned safe-deposit box Number 395 to Asabil, into which he placed the document, locked it, and flew home to Egypt. It lay there for sixteen years.
For many years I lived on the North Shore of Long Island and on several occasions went through Hicksville; you can’t miss it on the Long Island Railroad because it’s still the main junction for the Northern and Southern Shore lines. Hundreds of commuters get on and off at the Hicksville station going in and out of New York.
I was just beginning to take up my studies in the biology and history of papyrus, but even in those years, if I had been asked, I would have advised Hanna or anyone else not to leave the Gospel anywhere on Long Island. The percent relative humidity there ranges from average highs in the sixties up to the eighties and beyond and, with a summer temperature range of 50 degress Fahrenheit to over 102 degrees Fahrenheit, the Hicksville area becomes a pressure cooker in the middle of summer. Even in an air-conditioned building, Box Number 395 would not be impervious to the moist air, and with time it would become an incubator for all sorts of papyrus-eating fungi, insects, and bacteria.
The story of the Gospel of Judas is well told by Herbert Krosney. His exciting book, The Lost Gospel, contained a detailed account of the quest, discovery, and subsequent history.2
It is a codex from the third or fourth century, originally of sixty-four papyrus paper pages that contained several other documents in addition to the Gospel of Judas. The pages are all sewn together into what Krosney calls, “one of the greatest discoveries in Judeo-Christian archaeology.” Yet when it was later taken from the Hicksville bank box, it was hardly recognizable.
Ancient papyrus left in dry tombs or placed in earthenware jugs buried in the hot, dry, sands of Egypt will last for thousands of years. Once brought out into the moist air of northern cities such as Geneva, Switzerland, or New York City, they begin disintegrating. Scrolls or codices kept in a moderate environment, just slightly on the dry side, will survive quite well, so well that papyrus scrolls of earlier centuries were strong enough and pliable enough to be written over in later centuries or rolled and unrolled.3 As long as a certain low percentage of moisture is contained in the papyrus paper, it remains flexible and tough, but when excessively dried it shatters, or if moistened it becomes moldy or is eaten away. Unless it was conserved and restored, the papyrus codex left in the box at Hicksville would soon have deteriorated beyond all hope of repair.
Hanna’s second trip to JFK was made in 2000 at the urging of a Swiss antiquities dealer, Frieda Tchacos Nussberger. She had decided that it was time to get the document out of the hands of Hanna (which was a pseudonym, his real name has never been disclosed). A short, stout man with a goiter in his neck and a chain smoker, when he first carried the Gospel to the United States in 1984 he was forty and unmarried. He had subsequently married and through the intercession of his wife, accepted Nussberger’s new, lower price. Perhaps he was now aware that the cost of repair and conservation would exceed his original asking price but even he was not prepared for the deterioration that had gone on inside the safe-deposit box.
When it was opened, “Hanna’s face turned pale with shock,” said Krosney. “The stale air was filled with the odor of rotting papyrus. The manuscript had deteriorated significantly . . . it was in miserable condition.”
In 2004 it was announced that the Gospel would be returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, which had agreed to accept it after it had been restored, which happened in 2009 and was the most famous repatriation of a papyrus artifact ever. This feat was accomplished by Tchacos who transferred the manuscript to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, based in Basel, Switzerland, a foundation that later teamed with the National Geographic Society and the California-based Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery to restore, translate, and publish the Gospel, with the agreement that all pages would eventually be housed permanently in Cairo.
The key to the project was the interest of the National Geographic Society, which, according to Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s vice president for Missions Programs, provided the Maecenas Foundation with “the necessary resources to restore and translate the documents.” In exchange for which, they acquired the intellectual property rights to the document. One of the NGS’s conditions for funding the restoration was that the papyrus codex be returned to its country of origin.
There were several reasons for this papyrus book being returned; one was that it was illegally smuggled out of Egypt, often a point disregarded in the fast-talking, fast-moving global antiquity market, but as it turned out, the codex was found to be quite a famous document, and thus became a hot property in more ways than one. And with the then-head of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, on the trail of such things and quite willing to make a legal stand, it required a braver than usual museum director to keep such a thing.
The second reason it was given back was that it was disappearing, it was in such delicate condition that every curious collector and papyrologist who opened the covers to look at it, or turn its pages, or just unwrap the newspaper it was wrapped in, took a toll. It crumbled as they watched. And because of the extraordinary cost of restoration, private dealers would not likely be interested. Conservation, restoration, and imaging are extremely expensive undertakings, best done by qualified institutions, meaning that the document could no longer remain contraband; it would have to be brought out into the open and made public.
The Judas Gospel as it was called, is an interesting case beyond the fact that it was repatriated after restoration. It is also an example of the destruction that can be wrought when an antiquity is “rescued” by private individuals motivated by profit. The philosophy of Wallis Budge and others, such as the dealers and traders in Dishna, that they were “rescuing history” doesn’t work if the antiquity is a papyrus page made delicate by being kept under adverse conditions. In the hands of a dealer who is not an expert, it could be lost forever.
On the other hand, the international effort to rescue the codex by making use of new technologies showed the advantages of having major organizations involved in restoration. It also helped that the object concerned could be restored to at least some level of its former self, making repatriation an attractive proposition.
Meanwhile, how are museums to deal with repatriation of antiquities, especially those made of papyrus? Today millions upon millions of fragments exist almost always in delicate condition and often in need of restoration, the cost of which is prohibitive; it involves the use of techniques such as transmission electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, radiocarbon dating, UV scans, multispectral imaging, and X-ray fluorescence scans, as well as standard manuscript restoration, cleaning, and translation. Is it any wonder that restoration programs often cost more than the initial price paid for a manuscript?
The Judas Gospel project was also an example of how repatriation could work, essentially by having a willing dealer act as broker and a foundation provide a base of operations so that a consortium of restoration experts can be assembled for the purpose. Most importantly, a major organization would have to be found to provide funding under conditions that were agreeable to all parties, including the stipulation that the restored object go back to the country of origin.
In the future, however, it would be more desirable to see some of the major technical work and management of such a program carried out in the country of origin as much as possible, even though it might require more time and effort, it is still worth it. Many of these countries already have facilities in place and are carrying on programs and acquiring experience. In Egypt, papyrus restoration programs are going forward in the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, and in the Restoration, Conservation, and Microfilm Centre affiliated with the Books and National Manuscripts House and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. The Laboratory of Papyrus Conservation at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo under the directorship of Sayed Hassan helps deal with almost 30,000 papyrus items in the museum. Also, an old friend of mine, the Italian conservationist Dr. Corrado Basile, vice president of the International Institute for Papyrus (Museo del Papiro) in Siracusa, Sicily, is partnering with Egypt in a project, “aimed to preserve the papyri for the long-term, not just to restore them to be looked at now,” according to Basile, who is also helping restoration efforts underway on papyri owned by the city’s Greco-Roman Museum and the Alexandria Library.
In summary, not only is the proper restoration of cultural relics like papyrus codices and scrolls ethically the right thing to do, it is vital to the preservation of world cultural heritage. The history of the world, and our modern understanding of thousands of years of history, after all, would have been vastly different without them.
Which brings us at last to global development and the role of ancient paper. To understand what part paper had to play we could look at the technical side and compare it, for example, to the wheel, which gave rise to everything from transportation to modern day machinery and almost everything in between. Most people would say that because of all that, the wheel is a key element in global technical development. But, what of global cultural advancement? There the role of the wheel diminishes. Writing might be a better candidate, except for the fact that it is not an element in the sense intended; it is more an act or process. When inscribed on a rock surface, it transforms the stone into a “document,” but one that may be monumental in scope and size. It is perhaps the ability of paper to bring such a “document” to life that qualifies it as a key element in cultural advancement.
The word advancement implies momentum, and it was the move away from messages painted and carved on rock faces that made the difference. Once the move was made to papyrus paper—a mobile, flexible, portable new medium—it never stopped. This was a pivotal moment in world history; we were set free.
Trust in papyrus paper became possible once it was clear that it was capable of lasting if kept under the right conditions; it was durable and, unlike parchment, erasures of permanent ink on paper could be detected. It was also comparatively cheap, made from what was an inexhaustible supply and very handy, which was why the Christians took to it for the production of their most cherished writings, such as the Bible. Soon it gave rise to collections stored in libraries, new institutions that reminded us that knowledge was power and that libraries were a focus of such power.
People in the ancient western world became accustomed to being able to write things down easily, whether it was household accounts, a shopping list, or government records, as well as books and poetry, etc. Once people got used to being able to record and transmit information so easily, the medium might change, parchment or pulp paper might come or go, but this habit and expectation of writing things down became a hallmark of civilized life—thanks to papyrus. Humans were never going to revert to stone or clay tablets again for the transcription of the written word. In other words, we are what we are not in spite of paper, but because of it.